but u still can't write sci-fi

Chad Harbach writes about the explosion of graduate writing programs in the US, and its peculiar coupling with the collapse of the publishing industry in New York. It includes the most succinct description of the "Iowa effect" that I've ever read:

What's remarked rarely if at all is the way that this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, Calif., to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Mich., to Tallahassee, Fla. (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at the New Yorker offices on 42nd Street).